A new newspaper giant in the making?

 The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story on the dreams of David Hoffmann.

It notes he's the founder of Hoffmann Media. It adds that he owns 8.7 percent of Lee Enterprises, whose flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and which also owns a number of medium and larger dailies/former print dailies. That includes the Waco Tribune and the Bryan-College Station Eagle here in Texas. He also, just disclosed by him, has 5 percent of the Dallas Morning News' parent.

And, he wants to get this all combined.

He's already bought one small regional cluster off Lee, and said he's had some friendly talks with them. He's not yet talked with Belo. I think they'd be hesitant, but who knows?

On Lee, the story continues that he's only No. 2, apparently. An Indian investor last year acquired more than 10 percent, and the company adopted a poison pill in response.

Hoffmann said he thinks the American newspaper industry is undervalued. He also said any acquisition attempts would be non-hostile.

Beyond that, it looks audacious. Hoffmann Media is a bunch of nondaily and small daily papers, as in stuff primarily nondaily in print before COVID.

Besides the Post-Dispatch, Lee's papers include the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Sioux City, Council Bluffs and Davenport in Iowa, the Omaha Herald and Lincoln Journal Star in Nebraska, Buffalo News, Tulsa World, etc, etc. Unless Hoffmann has a LOT of money elsewhere, or some VERY friendly banksters, how does he pull this off? Per Forbes, he's got a real estate mini-empire, and he's from near St. Louis, so a personal interest in Lee's top newspapers. I think he'd have to do some liquidation of his real estate assets as part of such a move.

(As of of early September 2025, per this story, Hoffmann was now one of the top two Lee investors and was still trying to buy the company outright, and still owned his slice of the Snooze.)

McClatchy: On the clock and on the block

Chatham Assess Management has made an official bid for McClatchy as it currently sits in bankruptcy court.

Of interest here in Texas is that McC owns the Fort Worth StartleGram, which has looked primed to move closer and closer to an informal, if not formal, JOA with the Dallas Snooze for some time.

The big sticking point has been, in my guesstimate, that Belo owns nothing but the Snooze, a few Dallas print spinoffs and that's that. Basically, a JOA for these two papers means the end of Belo as an independent company. Yes, it's also got that digital marketing biz, but ...

It's unclear if and when McC will get sold and to whom. Per Chatham's bid, it's also unclear if it will be accepted and on what terms, or even officially let into the mix as a stalking horse bid.

But I would be seriously surprised if the Metromess proper (excluding Little D in Denton) has more than 1 independent daily paper by Jan. 1, 2021.

As I wrote on Tuesday, the Snooze probably should be snoozing print days.

The next step closer to a formal JOA, or something like that, would be it and the StartleGram deciding, between days other than Wednesday and Sunday, who's doing a print version and who's not, since they have a certain amount of distribution overlap beyond Dallas and Tarrant counties and the inner ring of suburbs.

The Morning News and the COVID demise of regional dailies: Why isn't the Snooze snoozing some days?

A couple of weeks ago, the St. Petersburg aka Tampa Bay Times announced it was cutting back to just two days a week in print. My take here.

Having looked at last Thursday's Dallas Morning News, I can't understand why it isn't doing the same.

First, the paper was less than 30 pages. I remember it wasn't too awfully long ago that Mondays crashed the sub-30 barrier. Thursday isn't a huge day, but it used to be decent, in part because some stores wanted to get a jump on weekend sales.

Second, I do understand that that includes not having sports, because there is no sports to cover. That said, that's a good reason why more regional dailies should be scrapping some print days, anyway. (Not to mention that sports pages long had near-zero advertising on them.)

OK, even without sports pages as a lead anchor on the ad percentage, and counting obits as part of the adhole, as I long have done with any paper from a decent semiweekly up that I know charges more than a nominal rate on obits? It was still less than 3 1/2 pages of adhole. About 13 percent.

You can't do that.

Plus, Belo doesn't have wiggle room. Its digital marketing services may make more than the Snooze, but remember, the Snooze and affiliated print products in the Metroplex are all the Belo owns, other than its digital marketing, which for a variety of reasons, investors and others don't totally like.

TINA, per Thatcher.

Snooze takes bath on resale of Belo building

Last fall, after moving out of the historic Belo Building, AND not even spending money to move "The Rock" to its rented digs, the, I am sorry, The Dallas Morning News sold the building for $33 million.

Although nobody would officially tie this to Amazon's national Grifting for Dollars work as it hunted for a second headquarters, which it eventually of course split into two parts and has now pulled back on the NYC part, everybody saw it that way, especially since KDC and Hoque backed out soon after Amazon said sorry to Dallas.

Well, the Snooze has now sold it again.

For $5 million less.

In addition, original buyer KDC said that if it resold to Amazon, the Snooze would get a cut. New buyer Ray Washburne made no such pledge, even though, technically, Amazon could come calling. He's also paying less than $6M of it up front.

There's that anti-Midas touch at work!

Per that second link, which is from D Magazine, it seems hard not to see a push by an activist shareholder for Belo to go private and/or sell the paper as being behind this in some way. A letter from said shareholder notes that Belo's digital marketing has tanked even more than the paper itself.

I think, re the digital marketing, what we have is a signature moment mix of Belo arrogance and Belo stupidity. That said, said activist investor could have found 15-20 straight years of semi-regular occurrences of that; nobody forced him to buy his shares.

Hey may not know Mavericks hoops, but he does know CEO-ing more than Snooze

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban makes a compelling case to make CEO pay cash-only:

Make companies generate 100 percent of their compensation in cash that will be 100 percent expensable in the quarter paid.

Counteracting the “CEO as riskmeister” myth, Cuban writes:

Everyone who works for that company is at risk – of losing their jobs, benefits, raises, you name it. Employees live in the corporate cash zone, while CEOs and the top few in management live in the equity/lottery ticket zone.

Too bad an outsider like Cuban had to write something like this instead of the Dallas Morning News’ own op-ed staff

Of course, given that Bob Decherd, CEO of Belo Corp., the parent of the Snooze, got a $3 million bonus last year, despite a negatively performing company — a bonus that works out at about $60,000 per each of 50 fired editorial employees — it’s no wonder it took an outsider to write this.

The only wonder is that the Snooze even published it.